Pedro Reyes

These shovels have been distributed to a number of art institutions and public schools where adults and children engage in the action of planting 1527 trees.

Pedro Reyes (born 1972) is a Mexican artist.

He uses sculpture, architecture, video, performance and participation.

His works aims to increase individual or collective agency in social, environmental, political or educational situations.

He has exhibited internationally, and is represented by Lisson Gallery.

Reyes lives and works in Mexico.

After studying Architecture, Reyes founded "Torre De Los Vientos", an experimental project space in Mexico City which operated from 1996-2002.

Tree plantings have taken place at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2008), San Francisco Art Institute (2008) Maison Rouge, Paris (2008), Lyon Biennial (2009), Marfa, Texas (2010), Denver, Colorado (2010), Boston (2011).

It aims to show how “an agent of death can become an agent of life”.

"Disarm" was another art project that Pedro Reyes created that was produced in relation to "Palas por Pistolas."

For this project, Reyes was contacted by Mexican government officials who were informed of the work Reyes was doing to help gun control in Culiacán, Mexico.

They reached out to Reyes to notify him about the 6,700 confiscated guns that they had received to see if he could use them.

Keeping in mind how the shovels in "Palas Por Pistolas" had brought people together, Reyes decided to use the guns and their parts to create musical instruments.

He was able to construct wind and percussion devices that could actually produce sound.

It first started as Reyes’ contribution to the 2008 Yokohama Triennale and then as a Project for the CCA Kitakyushu.

Curator Akiko Miyake and puppet master Takumi Ota worked with Reyes to create a series of puppets and a trailer which were exhibited in a traveling show in Japan.

Mexican production house Detalle Films became interested in producing the first episode that would become a TV series.

A pilot was shot in 2009 which created interest in a feature film rather than a TV series.

Recently Baby Marx has been shown at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, and a series of small clips have been released for the internet.

"Sanatorium" is a temporary clinic that provides short, unexpected therapies.

Brought to Brooklyn in 2011 with the Guggenheim's support, Sanatorium is a utopian clinic of topical treatments for those inner-city afflictions we are all too familiar with: stress, loneliness and hyper-stimulation.

The instruments were then used in a performance in 2012 at the Mexico City gallery Proyecto Liquido.

After exhibiting the performance there, "Disarm" went on to several other galleries around the world.

This piece was called involved musicians who helped Reyes create assemblage like instruments based on their unusual sound.

Reyes talked about the musical instruments sound as an “exorcism or an elegy.”

"Baby Marx" is a puppet comedy, featuring as main characters Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

In two-hour windows, Sanatorium visitors experience up to 3 sessions from 16 options through meetings with a series of “therapists". In "therapy" one gets to play and consider self. The cure is in the process, powered by what the individual is willing to give and unload. All 16 treatments are based on traditional methods of expression or respected forms of perception changing programming. Balancing reality and fiction, Sanatorium draws from Gestalt psychology, theater warm-up exercises, Fluxus events, conflict resolution techniques, trust-building games, corporate coaching, psychodrama, and hypnosis. In 2012, Sanatorium has been presented in DOCUMENTA (13), the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013, Toronto's The Power Plant in 2014, ICA Miami, CAM St Louis, and OCA São Paulo in 2015.

pUN is an experimental conference in which regular citizens act as delegates for each of the countries in the UN and seek to apply techniques and resources from social psychology, theater, art, and conflict resolution to geopolitics.

The first edition of the People's UN was presented at the Queens Museum in 2013.

In 2015, he received the U.S. State Department Medal for the Arts, and was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow.

pUN’s second edition took place at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2015).

In 2016, he was visiting lecturer at MIT's Art, Culture and Technology program where he co-taught the course The Reverse Engineering of Warfare: Challenging Techno-optimism and Reimagining the Defense Sector (an Opera for the End of Times)” in conjunction with Carla Fernández.

The course explored the interplay of imperialism, armed interventions, the defense budget, the history of engineering and military technology, crisis management in environmental disasters, popular entertainment and the global imbalances created by the West’s fixation on technological advancement.

The resulting performance included collaborative creative enactments of the actual facts and the (often unasked) ethical questions faced by society today.

In 2017, he was the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.

Ad usum: to be used, a monograph of his work, edited by José L. Falconi, was published by Harvard University Press in late 2017.

“Palas por Pistolas” is an art project and a campaign to curb the trade of small weapons into Mexico.

The campaign was first organized with the support of the Botanical Garden of Culiacán and the City authorities.

The population was invited by a series of TV ads and radio announcements to exchange firearms for vouchers and electric appliances.

The campaign broke the national record of voluntary donation, and the firearms were crushed by a steamroller, melted and re-moulded into 1,527 gardening tools.